> Three questions: > > 1) both cron and at seem to run programs in the background. However there > is no pid when I do a ps aux, so how do I stop a job from running?
Well, they don't get run immediatly ofcourse, only when it's time, you can try to kill them then, but best is to make changed to your cron or at configuration if you don't want something to get run. Maybe you can use something like start-stop-daemon, maybe that can make .pid-files for you (it does say something about it, not sure, never tried it, if someone knows to tell me too). > 2) can cron or at jobs be run as one-liners? Eventually I want to write a > perl of sh script (not that I know how, but I want to try) incorporating Sure you can do whatever you like (easiest would probably be to make a shell script or something and run that). > one of the two. For cron you need to use an editor to write the command, at > comes with its own prompt. > 3) how can I change the default editor for cron. vi is too cumbersome for me. I think you need to do something like (if you use a C-shell like shell it's different I'm afraid): export EDITOR=emacs or export EDITOR=joe whatever.